Some people go the coffee route, I went the the coke way. It helped me through university, late nights and tough times. Luckily now I have tea and my wife and I barely touch the fizzy stuff.
After purchasing XSI, I created the coke bottles as a way to test a multitude of features and workflows in the product. Things like particles systems, the render tree, poly modeling, mental ray 3.6 and compositing.
The final images were rendered in mental ray with post work in photoshop.